OGGs don't download from servers

[rallfo]

(Yes the perennial "please add OGG download support" thread that's been going around since UT2003)

I think one of the key selling points of KF over the competition is the way a wealth of add-on content is available to new players simply by double-clicking in the server browser.

I can load up a Vanilla client and download Blackcheetah's entire mod automagically by connecting to our vehicle server, yet the client balks at downloading a few megs of OGG (when map sizes now are many times in excess)!

There are some really talented composers and musicians contributing to some of the amazing projects released for this game so it is such a shame that most players won't hear their work.

Especially so for some of the breathtaking story mode masterpieces in which the music is a particularly crafted and integral part of the setting and experience.

Please make KF automagically download the OGGs!

[rckrdude]

wow there are composers putting out music for custom maps? This just HAS to be implemented.

[zYnthetic]

Or players could just install the maps properly and gain the ability to play them offline, host on listen servers, and not have the content purged over time. Game servers are no substitute for file hosts. This is why it pains me when I see maps here linking to places with no indexes like rapidshare or megaupload when easily searchable, indexed hosts like filefront/planet and moddb all have KF sections that can be browsed.

[rallfo]

Within the majority of the KF gaming audience will not have the technical competence or motivation to do that. And out of those that do, the vast majority of players first encounter custom maps when playing on a server they joined (and downloaded) through the server browser not a website.

And the majority of those will not even know about the existence of separate music files that are missing let alone bother to track them down and download them.

So this is about making add-on music files transparently and automatically available to the full KF audience directly in game in the same way as everything* BUT music currently is.

* Maps, wav sounds, textures, meshes, unrealscript ....

[Dr.Stinglock]

The automatic downloading of meshes and maps and textures works fine and has some nice compression

+1 for getting some OGG support in KF.

zYnthetic: You can continue downloading and manually installing the maps, adding OGG support wont cause you any distruption or problems I'm pretty sure, if anything it will allow other players to have access to this extra content.

It really must pain you to see so many mappers not posting on your indexed sites, perhaps you can tell the mappers to stop posting and releasing stuff until you decide which site they should use.

[Zetsumei]

cant the ogg files be put in the mylevel content of the map just like textures can? Personally i find that seperate files on custom maps generally just lead to file mismatch errors when 2 maps actually want to use a different version of the same file.

[zYnthetic]

Originally Posted by Dr.Stinglock

The automatic downloading of meshes and maps and textures works fine and has some nice compression

ogg is already comperssed and is not going to see the same comression benefits other content will. It's like zipping a .zip. Maybe you save 1kb.

Originally Posted by Dr.Stinglock

It really must pain you to see so many mappers not posting on your indexed sites.

It's really the mapper's decision but quite honestly using non-searchable, non-indexed single file hosts, many of which expire over time, and relying on a single forum post as the only reference link to the file is doing little more than restricting the audience to people that browse this forum and happen to see the posted topic with the link in it.

Originally Posted by rallfo

Within the majority of the KF gaming audience will not have the technical competence or motivation to do that.

I really do think this has to do w/ the above. True that a lot of KF players don't know about installing maps because for the most part they aren't available on hosts they can actually browse. It's just assumed that they get uploaded to servers. To make matters worse, at times when they do dl an archive from a host it's possible it was packed with incorrect paths (like Mapname\Maps\Map.rom) or no paths at all.

Originally Posted by Zetsumei

cant the ogg files be put in the mylevel content of the map just like textures can?

UE can't embed generic binary files in maps.

Overall considering the role that server downloads serve currently it's largest advantage lies in the convenience of getting players in the game quickly. Keep in mind that content downloaded from servers cannot be played offline or hosted on the clients own server, requires far more technical ability to convert and navigate the cache than unpacking an archive, and is purged after a period of inactivity. How could server downloads remain attractive to players when the largest benefit of using them is removed? How could you convince me as a person you're trying to support with this request, that this course of action is absolutely necessary? Forget about my work in KF or even the mod. Just try to pitch this to me as if I were a musician who has "been on a few" UE projects over the past decade. I know what it's like to want to have stuff heard but I've always held it does more harm than good than to try to force it upon people.

[rallfo]

Originally Posted by zYnthetic

Forget about my work in KF or even the mod. Just try to pitch this to me as if I were a musician who has "been on a few" UE projects over the past decade. I know what it's like to want to have stuff heard but I've always held it does more harm than good than to try to force it upon people.

You're not "forcing" your work upon people any more so than a texture artist is "forcing" his/her work upon the players in the level!

If OGG music automatically downloaded I believe it would encourage more mappers to make good use of it. Since at the moment 99% of players won't hear their custom music for the reasons above, where's the motivation?

At the end of the day as a composer this is about getting your work to a much wider audience (who can choose to disable in-game music via the options incidentally) therefore this can only be a good thing and don't really understand your opposition to it...

[rallfo]

Originally Posted by Zetsumei

cant the ogg files be put in the mylevel content of the map just like textures can? Personally i find that seperate files on custom maps generally just lead to file mismatch errors when 2 maps actually want to use a different version of the same file.

Well that could presumably be done and would be the "perfect world" solution but I merely suggested adding the feature of automagically downloading OGGs separately for the sake of backwards compatibility (i.e. not having to repackage old maps for the music used by them to download).

Also if you try and compress an OGG losslessly (i.e. with uz2) it doesn't reduce the filesize and can actually get bigger which is presumably one of the reasons why Epic didn't do this in the first place. Certainly there are no patent issues unlike with MP3 so Tripwire should be free to do whatever they want here.

[Ihmhi]

Stepmania has it right. When you download new songs for that game, they come in smart self-extractors. Double click it and it automagically puts it in the proper directory.

[kingshinobi]

I would like ogg download ingame with the map also. Always wonderd why the ut makes didnt made that possible in the main game. I dont know how hard it is to make that happen or why they never made it possible but would be nice for sure.

[Bio666]

Nah. The built-in download is slow most the time. I'd rather download the pack while I sleep, extract it, and play without downloading anything. It sux when you have to download 5~10 mb and join at wave 5

[rallfo]

Originally Posted by Bio666

The built-in download is slow most the time. I'd rather download the pack while I sleep, extract it, and play without downloading anything.

Adding this feature would not stop you from continuing to do it manually if you prefer!

That you would rather manually perform the process puts you in the minority of players that:
(a) Have the knowledge and technical competence to do that
(b) Are actually willing to put the extra effort in to do that

FYI the game's download process is exactly the same speed as downloading directly off the HTTP server hosting the files through a web browser. If it is slow it is a poor connection at the host's and/or your end.

[Bio666]

Originally Posted by rallfo

...

correct, u're correct

[Slappy Cromwell]

I wish to throw in more support for this suggestion. It is an undeniable reality that a vast, vast majority of the players simply download custom maps straight from the server. It would be nice if everyone had the patience to properly download the packed files from here, but that's simply never going to happen. There are literally hundreds of levels available now, and it's unlikely the average user will just happen to stumble upon the particular ones that include custom ogg music.

As it is now, using custom music puts the mapper's creation at a massive disadvantage since only the tiniest fraction will ever hear it. The rest will simply spend the time listening to a stark silence, clearly not what the author intended.

[omarfw]

One thing people don't seem to realize is that THERE'S A WHITELIST.

If a map you make has illegal music in it, then TWI won't whitelist it. Simple as that.

Therefore it would work just fine if they allowed OGG downloads because all the maps have to pass TWI's inspection.

[rallfo]

Originally Posted by omarfw

If a map you make has illegal music in it, then TWI won't whitelist it.

You mean like the Spice Girls?

Those who include the copyright-infringing music in their map in the first place are solely the ones open to any sort of liability:

- Tripwire would be immune in the same way that Sony are immune if someone uses a Sony CD Player to play a pirated CD (17 U.S.C. § 1008)
- Servers are immune since they qualify as a "safe harbor" under the DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 512). So long as they comply with any DMCA takedown notices they receive to remove the alleged "infringing content" (i.e. the map) when asked, that is where it ends.
Similar reasoning applies outside the US since all the countries Steam/KF are sold in are WIPO signatories.

So I would be strongly against adding "whitelisting" for the music and there are good legal reasons why not to:

Adding in whitelisting means the system is no longer "content agnostic" because Tripwire are actively choosing to certify/non-certify specific content as it were. The DMCA 17 U.S.C. § 512 "safe harbor" provisions do not so clearly apply in this instance and if Tripwire were to erroneously "whitelist" copyrighted content this could even open them to greater liability than without the whitelisting system at all, even if the intentions of such a system _were_ to safeguard copyrighted content in the first place! It would come down to the legal interpretation of what them "whitelisting" something is actually deemed/ruled to imply, an interesting test case but probably not something Tripwire wants to get involved in!

[zYnthetic]

Keep in mind this is totally different than send music to players "for fun". Having the default map music dl from servers would also mean making the music a merged package like the rest of the content type (if you modify the package you will get a version mismatch error online).

[rallfo]

Originally Posted by zYnthetic

Having the default map music dl from servers would also mean making the music a merged package like the rest of the content type (if you modify the package you will get a version mismatch error online).

The implications of having the wrong version of music playing for a given map are far from game breaking!

Even though it would be the ideal solution, the proposition is NOT to allow OGGs to be embedded within Unreal packages (and therefore downloadable) as this would necessitate repackaging a load of old maps as you rightly imply.

Rather the OGG files should be downloaded by the game directly - simplified example implementation:
1. Walk the map for references to OGG files, check they all exist on disk / in cache, if not download.
2. For versioning issues: compare the sizes + mod times / MD5 checksums of files that already existed in local cache with those on the server, if they differ purge the one in cache and download again.

[zYnthetic]

So you're proposing the removal of the ability for clients to replace the music with that of their own?

Comformed (not merge, confused terms) pacakges are simply packages which must be the same on the server and client. For a server to push a file it has to be told that a file is required for the current game and the client doesn't have it. If the client has a different version of the same file the server will refuse the connection. In addition to the actual music, map INTs and INIs both hold playlist information. Since they are pertinent to determining what music should play when they would need to be conformed as well. For an INI, this is never going to happen. Map INTs also present a huge problem because of the differences due to localization.

There are a few heavy repercussions for making music a mandatory package type. The more you look into it the more things come up that will be effected, a lot of which is taken for granted.